Before our family moved back to the US, these were the last 3 birthday cakes I made completely from scratch (one for each of my 3 children):

Fast forward to my husband’s birthday last weekend. It was an important birthday – the big 30! And nonetheless, he was spending it in a foreign country, so I knew I had to make it extra special. So what did I do? I forgot alllllll about it until the morning of, when I raced to HEB as soon as I woke up and picked up my trusty friend Betty Crocker from aisle 7. When I got home, I mixed the ingredients from the box with a few other ingredients and baked it in the oven as required. When it was done, I was planning on making a double decker cake using the store-bought icing that I had also purchased that morning. The only problem was that the cake was SO light and fluffy that it COMPLETELY fell apart as I was spreading the icing on it. The ONLY piece of cake that didn’t completely fall apart was this one tiny piece (below) which I was forced to decorate and present as the entire cake (unless I wanted my hubby to be cake-less on his 30th!). It was SO small that I couldn’t even fit 30 candles on it!!!

Please don’t laugh. Ok, fine, you can laugh. I laughed, too. It’s a good thing my husband is a “the thought is what counts” kind of person or else I would have been really crushed.

I had a picture of the pile of mush that the rest of the cake turned into, but I was so embarrassed by it that I deleted it that night from my phone. <<sigh>>.

Have you ever had a birthday go seriously wrong?